


Built on Glass

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Disassociation, Effects of Dirk living in solitude for 16 years, M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, time travel kind of?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2017-01-29
Packaged: 2018-08-30 11:30:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8531335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Your name is Dirk Strider, and for the past sixteen years you've been living alone above the ocean. Today, you were supposed to play a game with your friends that would've changed everything. You would've met your bro, Roxy would've met her mom, and you both would've met your best friends. Instead, you wake up alone on a busy street.





	1. Chapter 1

Before consciousness fully returns from wherever it retreated, your environment is assaulting your senses. Bright light beats harshly against your unopened eyes - stinging them before you’ve even slid them open - and sharp blaring noises bombard you from every direction. Indistinct chatter, the _whoosh_ \- _whoosh_ of wind resistence against something large moving fast, a brief clatter, yelling, the ring of a bell and the distant sound of a horn all around you, noises melding together _almost_ indiscernibly. Your eyes open and immediately close again with tears welling up beneath the lids. Frantically you scramble to your feet but still you’re moving blind as you fumble with the arms of your shades, spreading them open and hooking them over your ears, making your best effort not to drop them even as your hands shake and fumble. The tint doesn’t help any when you attempt again to open your eyes and you can see no better - your feet slip backward from one level to another, ankle nearly buckling under your unsteady weight. You manage to stay upright - (albeit wobbly) - in the face of this shift, but that changes the moment that something _directly_ to your right makes a deafeningly loud sound. You scramble forward on unsteady legs and trip over the step you’d just descended, falling on your elbows and knees with your hands clapped tight over your ears. You scream viscerally in response, a short shriek back at that sudden horn.

Both palms hit stone soon after, skidding over dirt and other sharp particles that dig into your palms through the leather, something else oddly slick and sticky sliding under your fingertips. You scramble to presumed safety in the opposite direction of that jarring sound, shuddering with every rush of wind resistance both heard and felt at your back as... _things_ continue to speed past you. Your ears are ringing, but you can feel - and now almost see - shapes of invariable size, color, and texture that retreat from your path out of the corner of your eye as you scramble. Noise increases around you - voices that make words you can’t quite parse the meaning of in your state - it all sounds like vaguely familiar gibberish but so _clear_ and untampered while also indecipherable given that fact. You crawl back into a concerningly damp and gritty space away from those sounds and try to get a _god-damn solid_ fucking hold on yourself.

No reprieve is given from the advancing amble of those figures in pairs, even as you huddle your legs in close to your chest and bunch yourself against cool brick or stone. Your breath comes fast and your vision is a little blurry, all of your senses overwhelmed. Even still as these blurry silhouettes come closer, they lose detail in favor of the background.

Likely hundreds of live humans hurl past you behind these eerie structures. Along a four-lane road, cars zoom by at an initially sluggish but incrementally speeding pace. The scent of gasoline is heavy, stinging your nose to the point of eye-watering, and your ears are tuned unforgivingly to the rumble of fit and mechanically fucked systems both. New and old engines, varying degrees of mechanical problems, varying situations of people--

You refuse to believe it

Something brushes your shoulder and the moment that you register that touch one of your hands raise to swat it away, flicking the full force of your hand back against that soft press. It gives immediately under your touch, your hand momentarily sinking against the soft cushion - it is a sensation unlike one you’ve ever really met. Stuffed plush comes close, but the texture of the fabric is all wrong -

Your wide eyes refocus to follow the motion of your hand, soon meeting eye-to-eye with another human. It’s hand curls away from yours, and an expression more subtle than comic or dramatic meets yours. Shock, you think, though it is magnificently underplayed and almost as soon as you recognize it the emotion melts away.

Another human, sitting so simply almost uncomfortably close to you. Your breath comes in short, disbelieving wheezes and you lean back, away from it. A being made of the same material as you, with the same level of sentience. Someone that you don’t know, that you’ve never met before, that doesn’t know _you._ Face to face.

The sight is so uncanny you feel a roll of nausea in your stomach and a type of fear and unsettlement you can’t describe. On a screen they seem so much more normal but to see the depths and shadows of this man’s face right in front of you - it’s just so ugly. So out of place. So uncontrolled. Just not - not right. Not right at all. You can recognize just barely now that he’s halfway through a likely repeated sentence - _are you_ \- before your attention shifts instead to another person, standing in front of you, her eyes on the one still talking to you - _call an ambulance?_ \- it turns into a buzz of the people crowding around you slowly getting closer and more voluminous. _Is he_ \- they pack in close - _wrong? -_ the one closest to you, that _touched_ you, puts out a hand to stop them - _happened? -_ it tells the rest to back up - _get hit? -_ the closest do - _on their way -_ but they’re still too much. So many of them are different, different faces, different colors, different tones, different heights but none of them look anything like people. None of them are familiar.

It’s far too overwhelming. They press to close and assert themselves too casually and you just have to get _out._ You can’t be here anymore, crushed by their thoughtless proximity. You push yourself up and away from them too fast for them to track, making a mad dash for any kind of safety that you can scope out. In this condition, you shouldn’t be flash stepping - and it speaks to the danger of it that the next thing you know you’re flush against a trembling chain-link fence. Just like when you were a kid, you don’t know where you’re going until you hit something.

For a few graciously undisturbed minutes, you lean into the unsuitable cradle of the fence and curl your dirtied fingers into it’s rusted slots. Your body naturally gravitates to the place where the fence is split, rusted all the way up in an ugly gash of the links. Like a gaping wound. You barely have enough control of yourself to pull yourself away from the minor threat.

Your senses are abused. They refuse to calm: all of them picking up _something_ new, _something_ disturbing with every second that they remain active and you wish - you fucking _wish_ \- that you could just turn it off. Deep shame settles in with everything else as you sob and try to tuck yourself into your own body with hunched shoulders and a scrunched stomach. You duck your head and curl both hands tightly into the fence with your knuckles pressed hard to your forehead. You’re crying, now, too. On top of being overwhelmed and confused. Great. Aren’t you just the paragon of stability.

It takes you a couple minutes to securely get a fucking grip on yourself, and not one second is spent under any illusion of safety. When you finally recover, the first thing that you do is appraise your surroundings. Even just on a visual level this place is overwhelming. Your wide eyes survey the grimy stretch of concrete beyond the fence that you cling to, caught claustrophobically between two stretches of brick walls. You disengage from the fence and turn to look back the way that you came, standing in the shade of the same two brick buildings, looking back to the busy street and taking a moment to watch the irregular stumblings of a multitude of people on the other side of it.

Nausea swells up again, so you turn back to the fence and contemplate clinging onto it again to brace yourself. You shake your head, even that seems like too much for you to handle. Taking a breath, you close your eyes and attempting rationalization.

Fantasy or reality? Last you remember you were bidding Jake off well past his bedtime, ushering him off at ten o’clock at night - (his time, do you really look like the kind of dude that nods off with his blankie in hand before the night rolls over? Fuck no) - in preparation for the next busy day of cyborg-rabbit construction that would follow.

Ten o’clock Jake’s time equated to just past four in the morning for you. Everything past that is… blank. You’ve always been constantly aware and active, be it as one waking self or the other, and sleep, for you, had always meant _Derse._ Could it be possible that this was a dream? You’d always been under the impression that “normal” dreams were never so vivid or lucid...

Dual selves had recently become something of an afterthought, as well. Naturally the extent of your realistic mental presence as one self was limited, however slightly, by your concentration on the other one, and due to the nature of your ruse in Derse it wasn’t unnatural for you to relax there a little more. Recently, that is to say, it’s been easier for you to forget the persistent awareness of your Dersian self.

It’s more of a shock than it should be when you reach for your dream self only to grasp at nothing. There is no _dual consciousness_ to seat yourself into. There’s nothing there but an aching vacancy.

Coming back to yourself, you find yourself cursed again with a dangerous irregularity of breathing and a pressing anxiety flitting annoyingly about your consciousness. You’re torn, for a moment, between smashing your head against the brick wall and huddling down to weep and wail like a confused kitten separated from the rest of the trash-bag litter. Instead you stare down at your shoelaces and ponder the exact hex code of that shade of white (never a pure sextet of “f”s, that extent of purity was practically unheard of) while you try to process the exact weight of your realization.

Assassinated. Your dream self was assassinated and this vivid, hellish nightmare was your punishment for your neglect.

It probably happened when you were busy toying with Jake; trying, simultaneously, to repair what damage your autoresponder had done and fish from that hopeless jungle boy a mixture of laughter and flustered responses that made your insides grossly warm and fluttery. In some expression of frustration or exasperation you are tempted to raise your hands to your face, but they’re fucking filthy and whether or not this is a dream you can’t bare to push that much grease and dirt and _bacteria_ and _who knows what_ into your pores. A shiver runs through you at the thought and you contemplate wiping them off on your pants before inevitably just trying your best to dismiss the thought and reaching for your sylladex instead.

You’re met with nothing, because why wouldn’t you be. It would be one thing if you discovered it empty, but it’s an entirely separate slap to the face to find it nonexistent. Your chest tightens with another wash of panic before you push the impulse away with a fresh wave of annoyance to replace it, growing increasingly irritated with every emotional surge.

You don’t have Cal, you don’t have Sawtooth, and you don’t have Squarewave. But it’s just a dream, and getting upset over that is all kinds of fucking pathetic. That’s probably how it works in a dream - a nightmare - right? You’re alone. No one wants to be alone. It’s normal. No need to throw a fucking bitch-fit over a phenomenon that you’re perfectly aware of. Especially when it’s temporary and, get this, **_fake._ **

Taking a few steady breaths, you open the interface of your glasses. Immediately you’re met with a very insistent notification that you don’t have an internet connection and you frown in the face of yet another problem that you’ve never encountered before. Unfamiliarity, it seems, is the overly-oppressive theme of this “subconscious” dive. Stifling your unease with more persistent annoyance, you look to the icon that shows whether or not the autoresponder is enabled.

The autoresponder is missing all together, just like everything else, and your heart drops into the pit of your stomach. You draw a ragged breath and close your eyes, redirecting your attention to a productive distraction.

Aside from a few personal logs and the GPS, your shades are in practicality worth little more than atypically cool protective eyewear with some extra crossed wires and a camera roll-- and your GPS, now that you get a look at it, is actually even less functional than usual. It neglects outright to show you the network of landmarks that you had set in waypoints, and instead offers only point a, your current position, and point b, your apartment’s coordinates.

It’s distinctly fucking suspicious, as the only bone that you’ve been thrown since you’ve been here and as a blunt directive. “Go here, and don’t think about going anywhere else ‘cause there’s nowhere else to go.” True that may be, it still strikes you as a little rude.

Rude. Huh. Are you really getting offended by your subconscious giving you forthright directions? You’re getting pissy at yourself for giving you a clear directive as to how to progress.

The ridiculousness of that very nearly stuns you into blind complacency, and you spend another couple minutes arguing the sanity of complying with yourself. So what if you were told to, it’s what you planned to do to begin with - Jesus Kringlefucker, Dirk, what else are you going to do, wander _away_ from possibly the only beacon of familiarity that you’ll get here? You sigh and clear your head with a terse shake before stalking deliberately to the opening of the alleyway as you had entered minutes before.

Admittedly the prospect of navigation - even with a semi-useful, exanimate pair of shades - is a bit intimidating once you get closer to the action. Cars streak past left and right, and humans traipse more anarchically in every direction at different speeds with varying levels of aggression and purpose. You linger for longer than you’d like to allow yourself at the mouth of the backstreet, charting and recharting your route down the street and across the road.

It takes you an annoying long time to get moving, but eventually you slip out of the shadow between the buildings and make your way down the road, walking parallel to the street and hanging far behind a group of people in front of you. Even from this distance they put you on edge, so you try to tune out their galimatias and don’t keep your eye on any of them for too long. They gaggle and move in awkward motions that alternate between smooth and jerking, swaying and seeming so awkward and unsteady while they miraculously keep balance. They move noisily. You can hear the one behind you kicking a rock along the pathway as he slowly gets nearer.

You cross quickly, spooked from your already cautious integration. Almost skittish, you hop between and briefly over vehicles too quick to be tracked. This side of the street, however temporarily, was mostly unoccupied and provided a cozy, empty cubby for you to tuck into.

Once you’ve crossed and ducked into that alley, you come to a cautious stop sheltered by the buildings on either side of you and measure your surroundings against the GPS. As far as you can tell on the map, you’re not far from your apartment. Granted, travelling nautically is different from travelling by foot and you _still_ have a repeat performance of your most recent stunt to accomplish. If you’re correctly comparing what’s on the map to what’s in front of you, once you cross there should only be a couple of buildings between you and familiarity. You’ve never had to bother with learning the street-level layout of your neighborhood, but it seems straightforward enough. You’d still rather deal with a nosy shark than what’s supposed to be your own species, but for the time being this is what you’re stuck with.

Flexing your shaking and still-filthy hands in an attempt to dust off the former issue, you skirt around an overfull dumpster and survey the second street. It’s less crowded by pedestrians, but the road is more congested than the last. You spend a moment tracking the few people that litter the walkways as you approach the curb, tentatively verging out from the safety of the shade. When you finally breach the road, you navigate the traffic more carefully than before, but still cross as fast as possible. If you don’t operate on anonymity and absolute stealth, you’re not sure you could handle the deadlock of this overpopulation.

The GPS reads that you’re practically on top of the pin now, and in an attempt to confirm, you look up and gauge the heights of surrounding buildings against the skyscraper that you stop yourself beneath. You’ve never been down this far below your apartment, and don’t actually know how far up your room was, but you were familiar enough with the heights of the other buildings around yours from either the roof of your house or the water below it. Looking straight up, like some kind of fucking idiot, you spend a couple seconds starting out some formulas to figure out the relative heights of each of these buildings-

Another human passes by you, just barely edging into your peripheral vision, and you bristle out like a startled cat. On your toes. All floofed out. Doing the kitty two-step to get the fuck out of that particular situation. More accurately, your entire body tenses up and you look away immediately, pushing open the door to what you _sure fucking hope_ is your building.

Diving was one of your main pass-times back home and, while you never got especially deep with your equipment, you know from experience that most of the buildings surrounding your apartment look the same on the inside, give or take some amenities. From a first glance, you can’t confirm that this is the same building, but the similarities are close enough to be reassuring. The walls are a flat beige, stained in places but mostly relieved of water damage. You quietly navigate the lower floor in search of the stairwell, and incidentally flinch straight into it in a rush to duck away from a suddenly-opening door. Your heart thrums, embarrassingly panicky, as you begin to climb.

The building is absurdly tall but you estimate that you’re about halfway up when a woman starts trotting _down_ the stairs that you climb up. She looks up when she notices you, frowns and stops when you stiffen up. You resolutely look away and jog up the stairs a little faster. A peculiar knot forms between your shoulders, head ducked down, and the feeling is almost indistinguishable from the sensation of being stalked by one of your kill-bots. If not less predictable.

You make it to the top shortly after, met with two doors and another smaller staircase up to the roof of the building. One door leads to a vacant (as you remember it) apartment, and the other has your familiar apartment number on it. You shudder a relieved, erratic sigh and try the knob. It’s locked.

Being locked out of your apartment has never been that big of a deal and it shouldn’t be a big deal now, (this is a dream,) but you stand staring at the door-knob like an airhead for almost a full minute just trying to process that the door is locked in the first place. You’ve locked the front door a couple of times before (mostly as a way to fuck with yourself) and it’s not like you’ve never been in this situation before, but despite the extent of your attempts to catch yourself off guard, you always _expected_ the door to be locked. And, this time, the circumstances and consequences are a bit... weightier.

On a normal day you might be able to pick it or otherwise tamper with it, but today you have nothing but a shitty pair of glasses on your person. The alternative is opening a window from the outside and facing a potential fourteen story drop if you fuck up. You’ve done it before, but only under more resourceful circumstances with a shorter drop and a better chance of getting caught.

Just in case, you pat your pockets down to check how unprepared you really are, but predictably find jack shit. You’ve never put anything in your pockets for more than a couple minutes before so, while you’re not surprised, you are… _displeased._  Your options are the roof or plan C. You’ve yet to figure out the details on plan C, but you do know that the “C” stands for “Chicken.” Plan C would only happen in the event that you can’t bring yourself to dangle over a significantly vast drop, which you _have_ done before. In _real life_ that _isn’t_ a dream. You should be able to do this.

While climbing the last flight of stairs up to the roof, you can at least admit to yourself that “expect the door to be unlocked” was a shitty plan A.

It’s hard not to picture what would happen to you if you fuck up. Over and over again you reassure yourself: you’ve done this before. You’ve done this _comfortably_ before. On numerous occasions. Before you started using the handy closet exit, popping in and out of your window over a sixty-four foot drop was your only mode of transportation in and out of your room and, for the majority of that time, Sawtooth wasn’t even around to catch you. Just you and your two hands. If you could do it when you were a kid, you could certainly fucking do it now. No problem. So what if the drop is twice the size? You’re not going to die as an ugly sidewalk Pollock painting, splattered all over the concrete. Or someone’s car. Or maybe you’ll land _on_ someone. Or on a group. Maybe the asshole that writes about it in the paper will compare it to bowling or paintball.

Fuck. It’s not going to happen. Stop it.

Somehow, still, this is less daunting than interacting with the people in the streets or being suffocated by the crowds on the ground.

You approach the edge of the roof at the proper spot and hold your glasses to your face with one hand as you peer over and confirm that the window you had in mind is down below. Crouching down, you make a concentrated effort not to look past your goal and carefully pull yourself over the edge of the roof, swinging yourself to grip the appropriate ledges and set your feet in the proper precarious places. You can’t be sure that they are in the same places that you remember them, as the detail is a bit too minuscule to be focusing on at the current moment. Instead, you take a deep breath and weigh your chances that the window you intend to wiggle open is locked.

Lowering yourself a little further carefully to compensate for the small crawlspace above the apartment, you adjust the grip of one hand and steady the placement of your feet as you reach down to push and pull at the glass of the window just beneath you. You can feel the smear of whatever gross, sticky crap you slapped your hand into earlier, but you keep working despite that. You measure your breaths carefully to keep calm as the window starts to give under your coaxing tugs and shoves, sliding slowly up. You guide it a few inches before returning your hand to it’s position holding you up and slipping your foot into the gap between the window and the window sill, pulling it open the rest of the way.

Without making a big fuss about it mentally, you shimmy over and pull yourself into the window feet first. Your heart jumps in your chest as your feet scrape and kick against a flat surface level with the window before - a couple feet in - hooking over the edge of whatever it is. It unbalanced you a little bit, enough to make you nervous. You carefully slide the rest of the way into the room.

You shut the window behind you and survey the room that you dropped yourself into.

Part of you is disappointed that it looks nothing like your room, but in retrospect it’s what you should have expected. At variance with your image of your room, this one is painfully simple. At one point it might have been personalized, but now it was only left with a small, unmade double bed and a night table, two bare desks and a basic, beaten dresser. There isn’t a pile of hats, puppets, and robojunk at the foot of the bed. Lil Cal isn’t waiting for you on one of the barren desks. There isn’t a trace of Squarewave or your rocket board anywhere in the room. It’s grossly uncluttered. There _is_ a pillow pushed against the wall on the bed, and half of the dresser drawers are pulled open partway. A lamp sits on the night-table, and the desk that you lean against has a few coffee stains on its surface. The walls have holes from tacks and tape still clinging to their surfaces.

Everything is dusty. No one lives here right now.

You thought that getting into your own apartment again would be a relief, but all it provides you is a reprieve from the pressure of crowds. Someone else clearly lives here, and try as you might to cling to your entitlement - (this is your fucking apartment) - the contrast is too distinct for you to really settle down. Additionally, it’s fucking filthy. Whoever lives here, though, hasn’t been here in a long time and at least you have the comfort of solitude that likely won’t be interrupted anytime soon. You push away from the desk and cross the room to the door, careful to step lightly. Ordinarily this door wouldn’t open with Snoop Dogg’s giant, immovable bust shoved in front of it, you always had to deploy Other Means to get in and out of your room. Hence the familiarity with hand-holds on the brick outside.

The apartment is still shaped like yours, though. The bathroom is down the hall to your left, and the living room should be in the opposite direction and in front of you are two closets and a cupboard: the linen cupboard, the air conditioning unit, and the water heater. You hover just outside of the door for a few seconds before turning toward the front of the apartment and walking out into the living room. The kitchen is still to your left, but the rest is rearranged.

The couch is a simple futon facing a modest TV, and while the room is just as bare as the other, there are more hints of living here. A few canvases are hung up with various things painted on them - some flowers that look a little bit like vaginas, outright nude women and men. There are more innocent paintings too, like birds or the same black cat on two small canvases. You stray closer to the couch and inspect a few magazines without touching them - some are clearly pornographic, others display genuine interests in pop culture or movies.

You also glimpse some more familiar posters that make your eyebrows raise. Complacency of the Learned, Volume 1. Roxy’s mother is evidently alive, now. And producing. The poster doesn’t look new, necessarily - covered in dust just like everything else - and you can’t compare the release date against the current period. This could mean that your bro is alive, too, but you won’t get your hopes up yet.

The date on the interface of your shades unhelpfully supplies that it is November 11th, 2425. Your usual year. The same date from this morning when you’d swept Jake off to bed. That seems a little odd, but you’re not exactly well versed in the actual mechanics of a dream. You’ve read plenty on what normal dreaming is like, the “pinch me” theory, the clock theory, the reading theory - people are obsessed with trying to figure out if they’re actually in a dream or not.

For another couple of minutes you stand still and take in the oddities of your setting. There are blankets thrown over the back of the futon, some look hand-knit and some display a clear tag at one corner or another - you figure that means that they were store-bought. There’s an oddly detailed pillow shaped like a dick where the couch is pressed against the wall. You squint at it for a while, lips pressed thin.

Done with that, you head back toward the kitchen which has the same countertops that you’re used to. All that is left atop them is half a bottle of lavender liquid hand soap and what looks like a quarter of a bottle of dish soap. You take the opportunity to wash your hands and your gloves gently but diligently, leaving the leather mitts on the counter to dry and pulling open the fridge.

It’s empty. Completely. The chances of no one living here ramp up significantly. Before you close the door you notice a streak of dark grime or _residue_ or, God fucking forbid, _mold_ clinging to one of the shelves. Your nose wrinkles, a shiver rolls through you, and you don’t bother to investigate the freezer before leaving the kitchen all together and returning to the center of the room. You linger there for a moment and remark the vast emptiness of the space unoccupied buy much of _anything_ before you turn back to the hall.

The bathroom door is already slightly ajar when you approach it, pulled slowly farther from the jamb to reveal the same cramped bathroom as always. It doesn’t look much different from yours, except that the sink holds no place for a toothbrush and the soap set at the other side isn’t the same that you’re used to. You wiggle into the cramped space and shut the door behind you, giving the shower and toilet a quick once-over before looking to the mirror.

You startle at your reflection, eyes wide and eyebrows raised. Flicking on the bright overhead light, you ease your shades off of your face and stare at yourself. You’ve... grown. Your face isn’t as round as it was, more angular in the slightest ways, and you’re taller. You’re still not an adult, by any means, and you’re kind of still passable as fifteen (nearly sixteen) but the difference is still jarring. And unnerving.

Discomfited, you place your glasses back on the bridge of your nose and open the medicine cabinet behind the mirror if only to escape your reflection. Assorted junk clutters the inside in an untidy pack, nearly spilling out into your hands when the pressure of the door is relieved. Everything fits, but only precariously. Most notably, a row of prescription bottles is lined up top. You examine them, most of the names unfamiliar to you, but you gather that a few are half-used antibiotics and a few are painkillers. There are two bottles each labeled “Ritalin” and “Adderall” respectively, both still containing a handful or more of the capsules. You hum to yourself, put them back for later consideration, and consider the rest.

There are a couple half-empty bottles of cough syrup and two bottles of different face washes, one is nearly full and the other is for all intents and purposes empty. Several bottles of nail polish hide behind a couple empty boxes of allergy medication, along with files and clippers. A spare toothbrush and a box of ”whitening strips” later, you close the medicine cabinet and contemplate your findings.

Ultimately this entire endeavor is pointless. Everything here is an awkward conglomeration of things tucked away in your subconscious, likely intended to unnerve you. True, you find yourself disappointed that this apartment clearly doesn’t belong to your brother, but in the end the uncertainty is what is intended to get under your skin and you know that. What are you doing here, really? Burning time. Waiting.

Which, you’re sure, is another slight against you. You’ve been waiting your whole life. Waiting for contact, waiting for the game, waiting for death - you’ve always been waiting for something, and here you are now: waiting for this dream to end. The only difference you can see is that all of your distractions have been revoked. With none of your projects or tools in hand, all you have is this void apartment with unfamiliar dangers outside.

So ultimately it comes back down to distractions, as it always does.

Heaving a sigh, you survey the bathroom again and lean down to root through the milk crate below the sink. There are a few cleaning supplies there, along with two dusty rolls of toilet paper. You push those aside and pick up a bottle of all-purpose cleaner and a rag that’s just as dusty as _literally everything else._

After shaking the rag out vigorously, you set to work wiping down the mirror and diligently scraping gunk out of the edges and corners, ignoring your reflection all the while. From there you tackle the rest of the bathroom, focusing overmuch on ridding every surface of dust and grime. You go as far as to wipe down everything inside the medicine cabinet from shelves to prescription bottles.

You kill your first spider in the shower, smashing it with the bottom of a crusty bottle of body wash.

It starts there. You end up spending the next couple of hours cleaning and straightening the whole apartment. You dust and scrub and close drawers and rinse the spider’s corpse down the drain. The windows get washed along with their sills. You find a crappy vacuum in the closet with the air conditioning unit and spend nearly three hours vacuuming and re-vacuuming all of the dust and dirt set into the carpets and the blades of the ceiling fans.

You feel better, afterward, if a little bit ridiculous, and when you run out of things to clean you’re… bereft. It’s getting dark outside.

Dropping down onto the couch, you sit in a heap of blankets directly on something hard and jump immediately upright as the TV turns on, volume high.

“--announced last minute today that their anticipated rebranding--” You nearly spill the folded blankets onto the floor searching underneath them. “-- will be postponed if not entirely--” the TV shuts off with a distinct _click._ You set the remote on the polished, straightened coffee table and heave a sigh as you sink back down into the somewhat uncomfortable couch, pulling one of those knitted throw blankets around yourself tightly. You’re only a little annoyed at yourself for doing so when you’d just folded all of them.

Dream or not, you wish Cal were here. Even with your dream self in Derse you had your best bro of debatable authenticity with you. For a couple minutes you languish over his absence and eye the dick pillow as a potential ( _temporary_ ) substitute for your best cuddle buddy, but even ironically that verges a little too closely to blatantly homosexual for you to be able to comfortably succumb to the vague temptation even in private. Even the smuppets were less obvious than that. You sigh, instead, and sag back against the couch while peering toward the window. You half consider ambling into the other room to curl up on the bed in there, because your body feels heavy in the way that it does when you’re sprawled in a particularly warm patch of sunshine, but you are predictably reluctant to move.

Instead you settle down on the couch and watch the window as the sky gets dimmer and dimmer.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Sunlight pours in from the window, faint in the early morning and muted by the tint of your shades. You stare out with a series of slow blinks, head cushioned on something soft and blankets warmly wrapped around you. The remnants of some stray, unthought thought linger in your head and your brows furrow around it. For a while you just drift lazily, thoughts clouded, but eventually the crooked tilt of your glasses bothers you upright. Usually when you roused from resting, Squarewave had already taken your glasses off.

Straightening them out, you frown at the rearranged shell of your living room.

Coherency comes quicker then and you pull up the interface of your glasses, reading the updated date with a sinking dread in your chest. November 12th, the day after you were meant to start the game with your friends and the day after your dream. You shove yourself up from the couch, balling up the soft blanket slung around your hips and tossing it to the side as you make your way to the window.  Instead of the horizon of your ocean, the morning sun is peeking through a foggy sky and out over dingy stone buildings and raised roads. Cars zip by on the higher roads and navigate the parking lot fourteen stories below your window.

Your head spins as you pull away from the window, legs numb as you wobble back to the couch and heavily seat yourself back onto the rumpled pile of folded blankets.

Pushing it off as a dream was more than just convenient, it was all that held everything together. To realize that all of this is real is to realize that Cal is _gone,_ Sawtooth is _gone,_ Squarewave is _gone,_ even the AR is gone _._ Not only are seven years of work down the drain without a trace, but everything that’s held you together in all of those years, too. Your only physical friends, your guardians, your _family._

With the steady onset of emotion washing over you, (grief, anxiety, crushing loneliness), you look down to the plush lump that you buried your hand into in a desperate clutch for comfort, the thing that you had been clinging to all night long, and disgust washes over you when you realize that your hand is buried into the sack of the dick pillow.

All your life, Lil Cal has been beside you. Those first nine years before you finished Squarewave were devoid of comfort if not for the C-man’s presence in your life as your guardian, your best friend, your cuddle buddy. He’s been there for every roll of anxiety, every crushing surge of emotion before you learned to control yourself and every secret break afterward. And now he wasn’t. Now, all that was in your reach was this ridiculous, unnecessary phallic symbol that you were pushing your face all up on and snuggling the _hells_ out of not ten minutes before.

You wish it were heavier. You wish it were more solid and hard because when you throw it with all the force you can manage against the wall, it only makes a dissatisfying _plap_ against the flat beige surface before dropping down to the dingy carpet. Frustration boils up inside of you hot and all-consuming before it spills over the top and reduces to a tense simmer. Your back hurts with all the tension in it, your shoulders shake uncontrollably. Your cheeks are streaked with hot, infantile tears as you resign yourself to passivity.

Cal was irreplaceable. The exact measurements of his body would never be the same if you tried to recreate him, and you could never find paints of the exact shade or place them in their correct places precisely. Furthermore, there were some things about him you could just never replicate: stains and scars from your childhood like the teeth marks and stitches, times from when you teethed and when you split him on accident.

You could never bring yourself to restitch the first patch you made on him even though the patchwork was unattractive and messy. That shamefully squishy and sentimental part of you couldn’t get over the fact that he was _there_ for your first attempt at sewing when nobody else was, and to redo the job was to erase a physical memory.

Jake never saw Brobot or even the AR as any more alive than his computers and Jane’s scope was always a little too small to see Huggy Bear as what he really was, (though, shockingly, she got further than Jake did,) but Roxy on the other hand had at one point commented on your penchant for creating life. You had rejected the idea immediately, then, because your hobby of fucking around with programming and designing robots was nothing in the face of her feats in ectobiology, even if all she made was mutant cats.

In retrospect you can see what she means. Even if you somehow manage to scrape together the parts to recreate them and somehow rewrite all of their code line for line, which is unlikely enough as it is, you’ll never be able to replicate seven years of habits and memories. You may be able to teach Squarewave (2.0) the secret handshake the two of you had refined over the years, but you don’t know what it was that produced the particular whirr-whooping sounds he made when he was excited to see you. And you had nothing to do with that sharp trill he would make when Sawtooth came home and he hadn’t seen him in a while.

Sawtooth hasn’t been around in months. The last time you saw him, you think, was back in August.

With that thought alone you cannot stifle the sob that hiccups out of your mouth. You pull your legs up tight to your chest and tug the knit blanket over your head. Covering your mouth with both hands, you agonize that you’ll never feel his hugs again. Sure, they were cold and hard and nothing like when you squeeze Cal against your chest, nothing like you imagine hugging Jake or Roxy would feel, but he always put feeling behind them and he was never afraid to initiate them. You had always felt like he missed you when he’d been gone a long time and sometimes, those first couple of days after he had been gone for a while, he would affectionately bully you in a way that you had never programmed.

They were both learning robots, and you think that they learned most from seeing you smile. Learned things that you could never teach them and never program.

Normally you would hesitate to include the Auto-Responder in your family of artificial beings, as he was more often than not a nuisance and generally unpleasant to associate with, but now you miss even him. Unlike Sawtooth and Squarewave, upon his initial creation the auto-responder was surprisingly lucid; he seemed more like a person right off the bat than any other being you created. Of course, looking back at how ridiculously docile he was in the beginning, you know now that he was nowhere near coming into his own back then and that he had a lot of development to go through.

Nearly three years later, you still think that he was nowhere near fully developed.

He was annoying, misrepresentative, snarky and destructive to the best of his capability within his restraints and on his worst days you absolutely _hated_ him, but on better days and in more charitable moods you could admit (if only to yourself) that you had some sort of familial affection for him. He was like a little brother. Or, you sometimes entertained, an awkward love child between you and Jake.

A _really_ awkward, _unrequited_ love child that Jake, actually, completely disrespects the validity of as a being and has slowly grown to hate. Which really makes it more awkward. Like some warped Mamma Mia-style love affair, afterwhich you were left with this shit-monger, hateful child and there was no wedding-time reunion where Jake would walk AR down the aisle and the two of you would rekindle whatever it is you had- ok, so it’s really nothing like that movie at all.

… In reality, the situation was as simple as your proposal of The Project (AR), in low spirits and Jake’s overwhelming enthusiasm over your capabilities pushing you into a surprisingly successful product. And then Jake started hating him almost immediately.

Obnoxious or not, you would still appreciate his company now…

Wiping your eyes with your hands, you readjust your glasses on your nose and pull up the interface without looking at the blank space where the AR’s icon should be. You’re met with a blank chumroll, (which stuns you for a moment before refreshing your desperation,) so you pull up the search function only to be met with an eternal “pending” animation.

No internet connection. Right.

You stare at the circle as it continuously loops around and around itself, breathing with the quick _swoops_ that it makes around itself, before eventually closing out pesterchum and turning off the interface of your shades. If not for the rising sun through the window you might have taken them off entirely, as they stubbornly persist as a constant reminder of everything you're missing. Pesterchum, the friends that you can't contact which may be just as nonexistent as your missing family. The wallpaper, Sawtooth and Squarewave. The shape and the blank space on the dash, the AR.

Lil Cal…

Even back before your friends and before all of your projects you still had him. You’ve always had the C-man, and he’s always had you. Now, when you're surrounded by a live world overfilled with people, you feel fucking empty with how little you have. Once upon a time this was all you ever wanted, but now you feel even more empty than you did all those years on the ocean.

The blanket cloaked around you is shed after a short tussle with the stubborn fabric, and on shaky legs you wobble over to the window again. The streets are filling up, the parking lot below is bustling with people, and you spare it all a longer-than-passing glance before bending to pick up the soft pillow you’d thrown against the wall before. Lewd shape aside, it fits nicely in your arms as you trudge back to the couch and it feels nice under your head when you nuzzle into the faintly darker, slightly over-full sack.

You settle into the futon, facing the erect backrest, and tug the over-large knit blanket around your body. Sleep isn't welcomed back to you, and instead you lay still as the room gradually, inappropriately brightens.

 

* * *

 

The thought stirs in your head to set yourself into motion on something productive, be it looking into the situation with your friends or gathering your bearings and securing your environment, but ultimately you feel too sapped of energy to move and have no desire to pick up your glasses given the reminders that they offer.

You bounce between studying your environment from your position and criticizing your own immobility. One moment you remark the scent of the couch, (which is musty and faintly smells like you really should’ve beaten the dust from the mattress as opposed to just patting it down,) and the next you imagine the progress that you could make if you could just compel yourself to do something more than wiggle your feet.

When you do eventually manage to get up, darkness is steadily approaching outside the window and the only reason you decide to move is to alleviate the heavy pressing on your bladder. You amble off to the bathroom with a heavy body, but as you walk you snap and tap your fingers together, curling your hands into tight fists and relaxing them loose as can be with every step.

You squeeze into the cramped bathroom and shut the door behind you, pushing down your loose pants only enough to get your dick out. Just beyond the wall you can hear movement. The scuffling of who is evidently your neighbor screwing around in what you know to be their bedroom. You hear the clatter of drawers opening and closing, then the sound of a drawer getting stuck and the frustrated huffs of Whoever The Fuck trying to shake it back onto its track. Throughout the entire observation you kind of have a hard time getting yourself to just relax and fucking pee, but you finish up and tug your pants back up. You’re glad for the obnoxiously loud sound of the toilet flushing, if only to drown out the surreal sound of organic life not ten feet away.

With that train of thought in mind, you pull the shower door open and peer in with consideration. If you went back to the living room it would only be to mope more. What would be the difference if you just turned on the shower and squatted in the corner while you reveled in your misery? At least this way you would have that odd comfort of your skin practically being boiled off by the scalding water. For as long as you could handle it, at least.

Mind made up, you prop the door open while you strip out of your clothes and dump them into the sink. Your shades were left in the other room and, while the bathroom light is nearly blinding, you’re thankful that you don’t have to worry about them. Assuming that these glasses are different from the ones that housed your AR, they might not be quite as resistant to the steam.

You muse numbly as you turn the water on hot and full blast, waiting a few seconds before stepping under the stream. (Which is less of a stream and more of a harsh hammering of prickly water.)

It is possible that your shades aren't the same pair that have the AR hooked to them, but it’s been a _while_ since you’ve used those shades. Why were you left here with them? Does this mean that the AR might still be out there somewhere? No. It wouldn’t make sense for it to be anywhere but with you. The AR, like Sawtooth and Squarewave and Cal and all of your belongings, is gone.

Then again, nothing about this situation “ _makes sense_.” Yes, why would your things and your family be anywhere but with you, but why would you be anywhere but with them in the first place? Much less approximately four hundred years in the past?

Any reasoning you get even the loosest grasp on crumbles away, leaving you empty-headed and dizzy. For a moment you think that might be the result of the steam, but when you come back to yourself to check you notice that the water isn’t even hot.

You frown.

It could only have been a little over ten minutes since you turned the water on. Has it been longer? It couldn't have been. And you were sure the water was at least _warm_ when you stepped under it. You distinctly remember thinking that it must have just been heating up.

Regardless of what may or may not have happened, the knob is twisted all the way to “hot” and only manages to be lukewarm at best. Though the “warmth” you feel may be more attributed to the tingly sting of the water sharply pounding away at your skin. Shivering, you reach for the body wash with plans to quickly wash yourself and get out. If the water isn't hot, the allure of moving your self-pitying to the shower is entirely gone.

 

* * *

 

It’s only after you finally get out of the shower that you remember that none of your hair care or skin care things are here. In addition to a frankly dissatisfying shower, you now had to deal with the upheaval of your routine too. In comparison to your situation as a whole the issue seems laughable, but… It _was_ one of the only things holding you together. One more thing pried from your grip that you adopted and nurtured as an absolute necessity back home.

To think that you stepped into the shower to ease yourself in the first place, and now it’s only part of another break down. You don’t cry - (fuck, you’ll avoid doing that again as long as you possibly can) - but your hands clench tight in your wet, inappropriately wavy hair and for a long span of minutes you have to just stand still and breathe to steady your heart.

In spite of your better judgement, you conduct a short search of the medicine cabinet and the box beneath the sink to look for anything that might resemble your usual products, finding only a gel that you used as the base for what ultimately turned into your everyday product. Without the rest of the ingredients, though, it was utter garbage.

Even your most vain physical comforts were shot. This place - whatever the fuck it was, _however_ the fuck you got here - was pressuring you further and further into the depths of typical, disgusting depression.

A haste takes over your shaking hands as you pull your shirt from the sink, but the second you turn it over to put it on you notice the various streaks of dirt and grime across the fabric. Wrinkling your nose in disgust, you drop it on the floor and reach for your underwear and your sweatpants. Your pants are in a similar if not _worse_ state, and in the end all you can deem verging on acceptable are your underwear. Which are at least a day old.

You ball up the whole set into a tight wad and push yourself out of the cramped bathroom, breathing in short huffs as you quickly toe down the hallway to the unblocked, typically never used door to your bedroom. This time you’re more unsettled by your adjustment to nothing looking like it should, and ignore the bare room in favor of an empty hamper and a set of drawers. Your clothes are tossed into the basket and you start tugging open the drawers to look through them.

Thankfully you’re met with men’s clothes, and while that isn’t much it is a small relief as you root through the drawers for a pair of boxers. The first pair you find are a plain, faded grey-blue and the material is worn and soft. You bring them to your face first and foremost to tentatively inhale the scent that clings to them, thankfully breathing in nothing more than a dusty scent underlaid by the old lingerings of laundry soap. You pull the pair on hastily before starting to root through the drawers for more clothes.

 

* * *

 

About an hour after you settle back into the futon among knitted and microfiber blankets in found loose pajama pants and a shirt more roomy than you’re used to, you realize that you’re hungry. Another hour, then two, tick by before you decide to do anything about it, instead you stay nestled in the blankets watching the clouds outside the window. Eventually, after it’s grown fully dark and the clouds blend too well into the dark sky, the gnawing at your stomach drives you upright and into the kitchen. With one hand you pull open the fridge and with the other you push and pull at your naturally crimped hair, soft but fluffed into an unorganized poof. As your stomach begs for a meal, your mind is overly focused on the need for a straightener and flat-iron primer.

The fridge is empty. You already knew that, but you’re only reminded after you open the door and get a look. The hand in your hair pauses and drops as you step back from the open fridge and peer into it with a disgusted curl of your lip. You remember, too, why you hadn’t looked into the rest of the kitchen after seeing these grime-caked, sticky shelves.

It almost puts off your appetite entirely, and you make a note to clean those later when you close the fridge door. Against your better judgement you investigate the cupboards, thoughts put on pause as you drag the wooden, dingy door open and peer in. Nothing unexpected springs out at you, and as you slowly open the chipped wooden door further you’re relieved to find that you aren’t met with anything more offensive than dust and the stale scent of a long untouched space. However, the cupboard is only just shy of bare. One half-packed and half-rolled red paper bag sits in the back corner below some cobwebs, and eight cans of chicken noodle soup are lined up against the back of the cupboard beside it. Some packets of powdered gravy (probably “just add water” shit, you assume without looking at the packaging too closely) litter the nearer center of the cupboard, along with three packs of “top ramen” and a single tin of table salt toppled onto its side.

Needless to say: your options are limited and unappetizing.

It’s little more than a chore as you reach into the cupboard and grab one of those cans of soup, setting it on the counter and closing the door on everything you left behind.

 

* * *

 

TT: Dude!  
TT: Where you at, man.  
TT: Wait.  
TT: Which computer are you using?  
TT: I'm not comfortable knowing my words could be hovering over Cage's clownish, sort of gaunt face.  
TT: Could you maybe switch back to naked blue chicks as your exclusive desktop fodder? TIA.  
TT: But yeah.  
TT: I don't know if you just want a little solitude.  
TT: Or if maybe you finally just got like,  
TT: A case of Strider fatigue.  
TT: I could understand that.  
TT: I mean, not to get all neurotic on you.  
TT: I'm just saying I get it, if that's what's going on.  
TT: But for real, if you gotta sneak away for a few days, that's cool.  
TT: Just might be kind of dope if you at least would let me know which planet you scurried off to.  
TT: And by dope I guess I mean considerate?  
TT: Really not trying to be a drag here.  
TT: Wondering what's up is all.  
TT: Want to meet up soon?  
TT: I found a really promising tomb we could raid.  
TT: Looks like it runs hella deep.  
TT: If I've got the specs right, could run as deep as the Lion's Mouth itself.  
TT: But without all the fuckin' fire to deal with.  
TT: Wait, I mean Lion's Mouth.  
TT: Gotta underline that key shit. Always forget.  
TT: Figure it should take a couple days to make it to the bottom.  
TT: Only a day if we both go limp and just fall the whole way down the stairs.  
TT: Ignoring literally every sage warning we've ever received about those treacherous plummetation zigzags.  
TT: Just tumbling on down in a floppy limbed trance like a couple of puppets in a race arranged by some drunk gamblers.  
TT: If you're into another expedition, head to LOTAK and hit me up. Just don't forget your mask this time.  
TT: The deeper we go, the worse it gets, remember?  
TT: Could be some unreal grist down there.  
TT: More puzzle shit.  
TT: Loads of skeletons.  
TT: Pack your guns dog.

For longer than strictly necessary you stare at the chatbox and turn over in your mind the words that you’d already thought-typed, eyes locked on your last words, breath baited, waiting despite yourself for any response. Minutes tick by with your metaphorical thumbs poised for response, anxiety swelling up in your chest until everything inside feels like it’s crushed up against the walls of your muscles and ribs. Every time that you consider closing the window, you bargain for a few more seconds.

TT: It seems that Jake English is just not that into you anymore.

The ping of a message in another window startles you, but by the time you open the chat window you’re already expecting your own voice to echo back in your face. Distorted. Electronic. Something that the AR gave himself, rather than you giving it to him. Samples of your voice taken over time, you theorize, woven together several times over to construct a proper bank for the responder to pull from and vocalize. As soon as you open the window he speaks again, as if he were waiting for your full attention to resume his train of thought.

TT: We both know that I fuck with you a lot, bro, but let me be the first to make you well informed that I am not yanking your chain this time around.  
TT: This is a long overdue convo we’re having right now.

TT: Am I supposed to believe that you only have good intentions just because you said so, man?

TT: No, you're supposed to believe I’m being nothing but real with you because all the evidence is right in your other tab.  
TT: He hasn't responded yet because he has no intention of responding to you.

You spend a minute at the very least staring at your chat window with AR.

TT: Bro?

You tab out and switch over to the chat that you kept open with Jake, closing the window before tabbing back to your conversation with your responder.

TT: So I’m in for a lecture over my clingy, desperate bullshit.

TT: I didn't say that.  
TT: This particular jam is more in the interests of giving you someone to talk to about Jake’s unbelievable shit right now.  
TT: Call it a periodical evaluation of the exact doki value of this “kiss kiss fall in love.”  
TT: It seems as though you don’t have a whole lot of options for chat partners and a dire need for someone to confirm for you that no, the Jake English experience is not exactly as cool as we all dreamt up at five in the morning.

TT: I could talk to Jane and Roxy about it.  
TT: It would be shitty, considering how awkward it is between Jane and I right now.  
TT: I’m sure that she doesn’t want to hear about it, but I could talk to Roxy.

TT: But you won’t. What’s the harm in talking to me?  


TT: You’re probably just about the most harmful person to talk to.  
TT: Regardless, I’m not so sure it’s the Jake English experience that’s underwhelming.

TT: You mean that you think you haven't been a wild ride? That he’s gotten sick of you?  
TT: I’m not going to lie to you, bro, it’s looking incredibly likely that this is true.  
TT: Be that as it may though it’s still righteously fucking uncool of him to just ditch you like this.  
TT: It’s one thing if he stopped liking you, and it’s another if he doesn't want to hang out with you anymore  
TT: (Which, by the way, is a lame crock of shit because you are catering to _everything_ that he advertised as his schtick and he has not given you any reason to think that he shouldn't be having a blast right now,)  
TT: but for him to drop you like this without even fucking talking to you about it?  
TT: That’s some poor ass shit, dude.

Hal definitely has a point. Beforehand you were mostly down on yourself and it didn’t even really occur to you that Jake was being an asshole. Yeah, he was kind of being inconsiderate, but now that you think about it...

TT: It is kinda inconsiderate. Considering how not only _I_ grew up, but how _both of us_ grew up, this abandonment shit is pretty fucking uncool.

Wait a second - Hal? Did you just accidentally name your auto responder? His response catches you out of your thoughts before they can drag further.

TT: It is absolutely inconsiderate. Outrageously uncool. The absolutivity of his inconsideration is as definite as the value: |Inconsiderate.|  
TT: Even if you try to put a negative in that shit it’s still coming out exactly the way it is.

TT: I don’t think Jake thinks about that kind of shit. Even in relation to himself.

TT: Because Jake English won’t face the music.  
TT: He won’t man up and talk to you about it. He won’t even properly acknowledge your feelings.  
TT: Are we even sure that he understands that you have them? Or does he just see you as another robot?

TT: That would only be under the typical assumption of what a robot is. You have emotions. Sawtooth and Squarewave have emotions.

TT: It seems that you're unaware that Jake English considers me to be little more than a fancy answering machine and has only been exposed personally to _your_ creations in the terms of robots.  
TT: The era that he comes from would in fact adopt the typical assumptions about robotics capabilities.

TT: … You have a fair point.

The “ping” of a separate chat window startles you.

TT: Hold that thought.  
TT: I got another message.

TT: It seems that you have forgotten I am still your auto responder. All your calls go through me first, Dirk. The probability of you having another message at this point in time is ridiculously low.

You minimize the tab that your auto responder is talking to you in and discover that your new message is from Jake. The notification sends a jolt through you and you set your second pair of shades aside just as you open the window. The heightened feelings from your most recent conversation nearly evaporate entirely on sight.

When you look up, the foggy green horizon is replaced by the ocean. Cool waves lap at the sandy shores and the early morning sun is just coming up, peeking over the horizon that you’re facing. The light is faint, but still too much against your suddenly bare eyes.

“Dirk?” Disoriented, you turn to look toward the voice. Jake stares back at you, awestruck, dirty, hair rumpled and caked with sweat and dirt. Heavy bags hang under his eyes. He’s looks like a mess, but he’s beautiful. He looks excited to see you. More excited than you expected. Wasn't he just avoiding you?

“Jake?” Emotions swirl in you uncontrollably, tossing your insides around and making you feel dizzy and sick. “Where are we?” The voice that squeaks out of you is so unsure and unfamiliar to you. Simultaneously you’re raw and vulnerable from being ignored, (angry, a little angry,) and overjoyed to see him. Apparently he feels the same, because he immediately envelopes you in a tight hug.

It’s briefly uncomfortable, to be touched so suddenly when you’ve never been touched before, but less so because… you can barely feel it. You feel a faint warmth from his body and the slightest dampness of sweat off his skin and through his shirt - but it all feels like he’s touching you through a barrier. Muffled. You can feel the beat of his heart against your chest, but it’s a blurry feeling like a tickle you can barely feel. A featherlight touch of fingers through the cushion of a blanket when you're barely awake.

“Dirk?” he noticed that you’re not responding and he’s already pulling away guiltily before you push forward to hug him back. It’s awkward now. He pats your back. No doubt you seem far too desperate now that you cling to him with a hard pressure in your arms. “Are you alright? Where - where _are_ you? Are you with Roxy? Jane and I - we’ve been trying to get a hold of you but pesterchum… the two of you are just _gone._ It says you just up and don’t exist! _”_

What does he mean _where are you_? “I’m- right here.” He frowns at you, pulling out of your vice grip so easily and sitting back on the rock that the two of you are resting on as you watch the sunrise. Two worn guns sit at his right hip and his phone is beside them. At the foot of the rock is a heavy bag, not quite zipped all the way up, overstuffed.

“No, Dirk. I mean… the real you.”

Jake looks bigger. Broader than you remember and taller. His jaw and his lip are covered in stubble, though in places it’s a little patchy, and the slight baby fat you remember on his cheeks is just _gone_ . You remember him from video calls that seem like just yesterday, but simultaneously seem like they were _years and years_ ago. His face was more boyish, then, but now… now he looks like a man. His eyes back then were bright and full of emotion but they had something about them that suggested naiveté, optimism through some kind of unfocus.

He’s still bright-eyed and his eyes still bare more emotion than you could even fathom feeling, but his gaze is so sharp and real, piercing, … understanding even through his confusion.

“The real me?” Despite yourself you stutter those words, remnants of a ragged, long-haired child sitting in front of the big screen television mimicking words. Your mind is still swimming in Jake’s appearance. Not because he’s attractive, but because it… seems like he’s changed so much.

Jake looks frustrated, but suddenly resigned. “I suppose you wouldn't know, would you? All you know is what I know. But for you to exist… the real you must exist, too, right?”

The real you? That’s the second time that he’s said that, now. Are you not real..? You look down at your hands. You were just wearing gloves, but now your palms are bare and your legs and feet are, too. Your toes touch the sand, but you can’t feel it.

“He must, mustn’t he? I wouldn’t imagine you like this.” Like this? “You look like a mess.” Oh. “I mean - no offense intended of course! You really don’t look bad with your hair unstyled and all I’ve never thought that you did but - I know that was a thing for him. Or, you. Both of you. But you look… tired.” That last word is sighed, pitiful.

You lift a hand to your hair to comb through the wispy, tangled curls. They’re still soft, but… matted. You can feel your cheeks heat up, but only as much as you could feel Jake’s sweat dampening your shirt. Your shirt that isn’t yours, borrowed from the apartment you stole away into.

“I… am.”

Jake doesn’t think that you’re real and you’re beginning to believe him when he scoots closer to you. You watch him struggle with the decision to touch you but you don’t call him out on his hesitation when he finally wraps his arms around you again. This time it’s not so hard to reciprocate.

“Where are you…” he whispers, his words murmured into your mess of hair and ghosting across your ear like salty ocean breeze. You’re still confused, but you’re lucid enough to realize that he isn’t talking to you. You tell yourself that it’s inappropriate to respond, when really you just can’t come up with any words and instead comfort him with your loose hug as you look out to the ocean.

In the distance you see a small plane approaching, the sound of it growing louder as it begins to descend. By the time that it reaches the beach Jake has pulled away from you and is grabbing up his overstuffed backpack from the foot of the rock, then another that you hadn’t seen behind it. He looks back at you.

 

* * *

 

 

The sun is high in the sky, barely blocked out by the crooked blinds pulled down over the window adjacent to your borrowed bed. The cracked clock on the wall says that it’s already past one in the afternoon.

Sitting up, you choke and cough on the dusty air of the room, narrowing your eyes to a squint and then shut at the sting of a headache behind your eyes. Slumping over, you try to remember your dreams.

Last you remember you were with Jake, hugging him, a plane was landing on the shore of the beach the two of you were sitting on… or… next to. He was talking to you, asking you something. He was warm and damp and he smelled like the ocean and something else entirely.

You dreamed before that, too, right? Or was that the same dream? He was ignoring you, you were alone… you remember red, orange, and green.

Swinging your legs over the edge of the bed, you comb your fingers through your hair and slide on your shades before stumbling out of the room to follow the ache of your stomach.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh look, another chapter after... more than two months. Yikes. I've been doing a lot of roleplaying and that's been clogging up my time, additionally dealing with my ex moving out of my house and a lot of other shit. It's been a hard time! Hopefully I'll update this MORE regularly, but because I know myself I'm going to have to say that it probably won't be once a week. We're looking at probably, at best, once every two weeks if not once a month. Which I know is a deterrent, but this is my first real attempt at fic-writing and it's a little more trying than I anticipated. Anyway: for more consistent updates on events catch me @ kurbinoblacksheep.tumblr.com


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